Exhibits of the Computermuseum Stuttgart

computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

62 points·Tomte··8 comments

When I was studying at the University of Stuttgart, I once saw a demonstration where they were playing music over a regular radio by running a program on one of the old fridge size computers (can't remember which). The radio waves were just a side effect of it's vacuum tubes. It was a pretty neat trick, imho^^

You used to be able to do this by showing certain images on a CRT. It was cool trick back in the day.

Tempest for Eliza¹ was doing the rounds some years ago. I'm sure there were other implementations in the wild, but I can't remember their names.

1. http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/

Yup! That's the one I remembered. On a side note, I wish they still made sites that look like that one.

this was also the way to generate audio in old trs80 games (the Model-I had terrible RF shielding).

I wonder if the radio waves could have been received and read as data by another machine.

Probably. For example

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.0237.pdf

and for that matter all of

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=F8gvBUkAAAAJ&hl=en...

Click on the links of the exhibits and they sometimes have the original brochures and manuals for download. Sometimes even ROM images. Neat!

EDIT: The collection of PDP8 documentation is quite comprehensive [1]. The subfolder music caught my eye. There is a brochure about PDP-8 that was combined with a Tektronix display and a Schober organ to produce a written record of the music as played on the organ[2].

[1] http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp8/

[2] http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp8/mu...

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